CECILY SCUTT
CECILY SCUTT is a Perth writer and storyteller in love with the crossover between the local and the fantastic. Her short fiction has appeared in the literary journals Southerly, Westerly, Hecate, and in Eidolon. Her story ‘Descent’, which appeared in Dreaming Down-Under, was an ABC Radio National Short Story in 2003 and 2005.
An award-winning performance storyteller, she is always booked for Children’s Book Week in Western Australia, where she tells her original stories of fridge ghosts, clockwork whales, bathyspheres, the boy who took the Bag of Winds to school, and refugees abducted by the Moon. Her performance stories for adults have reached conferences, national festivals, literary readings, cafés and libraries. A series of these tales was featured on the Faster Than Light radio show in 2001.
Cecily is currently working on the second draft of a first novel, and the first draft of a second.
Her story ‘Europa’ is a lyrical and poetic meditation on home, memory, myth; and a personal voyage on Homer’s wine-dark sea, which is due north and west of Fremantle, Australia...
* * * *
The old jetty is crowded, but I can’t see Yanni, even from the yacht’s high prow. I lean on the hot railing and scan the milling groups. Perhaps he won’t turn up. Behind me Mick stoops around the sail, and the boat knocks against the jetty’s stumps, mast arrogantly scratching at the sky. My newly ex-boyfriend, in immaculate ironed whites. ‘Where’s the old codger then?’
‘He has to catch a bus, doesn’t he. He’ll be here.’
But perhaps he won’t. I imagine him hunched over the table of his tiny flat, trapped by fear. He would have the blinds pulled down.
The boy leans at the side of the ship . . .
Yanni’s white head threads through the crowd at shoulder height, bobbing like a lost fishing float. He is the only person here without sunglasses. A kind of shabby red blanket bulges in one arm. Finally he sees my wave.
I look away from Mick’s classic ‘Meeting my Elders’ act; the slightly raised voice, the use of ‘Sir’. Yanni merely scowls, standing four-square on the jetty’s edge. ‘We are not aristocrats here. My name is Yanni.’ He glances at the gleaming hull and continues more formally, ‘I say thank you now for letting me come on your boat.’
I expect him to be nervous on the water, clumsily gripping the rail, but he jumps in smoothly and helps with the canvas. I sit out of the way, next to his faded bundle, and wonder if it is only deep water, then, that is the problem.
The yacht shudders from its mooring and angles out across Fremantle harbour. The sun beats off the sail. When Yanni moves to the bows Mick leans forward.
‘Ginny, I’m sorry about Friday, hey ...’ I think of Mick, slurring through seven vodkas, declaiming to an entire party that my dress, which he’d persuaded me to buy, was too short, and my laugh, apparently, too loud. Then he’d cried all over the same dress, out on the back veranda.
‘Whatever, Mick.’ If I hadn’t promised Yanni, I wouldn’t be here. But Yanni has no phone to ring. And I said I’d help him go back to his country. Old as he is, this could be a last request.
He is crouched at the front now, eyes on the western horizon. Something in the tense muscles of his neck makes my own knuckles tighten on my knees.
The boy leans at the side of the ship and imagines . . .
I met Yanni feeding the ducks. A tiny man in a checkered shirt, crooning at the water’s edge. The back of his head pink where every fortnight the barber runs his shaver up through white bristles.
‘This one,’ he tells me, ‘was some people’s pet. One day they go on holiday, just dump her here. She was too frightened to eat.’ He says it frroiten. Every day he brings her special breadcrumbs. She knows his whistle.
He tells me young people are too frroiten too. No one joins the union, fights for the workers. Before he retired, he was in The Party. ‘I am always in the front line,’ he says.
I see him often after that. Soon he is dropping by my house, bringing me Greek newspapers, ‘to see the pictures’, and grimacing over my coffee. In Greece, he says, they take their politics seriously; when the Communists march, even the Chancellors of the universities parade in their robes behind the red flag. ‘I wish I could go there,’ he says, squinting at the smudgy text. ‘I could meet my cousins, too, before I die.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘I’m too poor. It’s too far.’ He sloshes cold coffee around his mug and fumbles with the newspaper. ‘Also,’ he says, ‘I don’t like the sea.’
‘You could fly.’ I could help you, I am about to say.
‘Even so —’ He frowns at the window.’— you must cross it.’
* * * *
Nudging through the Suez Canal, the ship rides high above the ground, ramparted like a castle. The boy runs from side to side, shabby boots clumping on the salty deck. To the right, the smog of the great stack wallows back across pallid Egyptian desert; to the left rise the red hills of the Sinai, grinding suddenly out of the land.
Red beyond red beyond red. Like the cliffs of Hell. Like his own home mountain captured through the stained glass of their village church. When he was smaller he thought the tinted slopes were burning. Breathless, he runs from the deck to fetch his mother.
‘Red, red, will Australia be red?’ he chants, as he drags her to the port rail. In the westering light he can see their shadows drifting on the banks beyond, fluid and elongated.
‘I don’t know. Wait and see.’ Her scarf is slipping back and scarlet gleams in the dark hair at her temples. Seeing his eyes there she tugs the black cloth away. ‘In Australia all the women walk bareheaded in the street. They wear hats only to keep off the strong sun.’ She shakes her head and her hair slips in tendrils round her shoulders. She is beautiful.
Still he looks doubtfully at the sailors grinning and staring in the stern. He holds her hand. ‘Will we be happy there?’
‘Yes.’ The red hills parade slowly past.
* * * *
Out of Aden the ocean opens green and empty. The ship steams across the sea like a snail across a mudflat, slow and solitary. The boy watches the water for dolphins.
His mitera has discarded her black scarf, and smiles at the other passengers. The Greeks on board will not talk to her — a widow or worse, travelling alone, why is she not with her family? — so she speaks with the English, practising for the new country. Each night she washes his linen shirt in che basin, and brushes her glossy hair with oil.
One English couple give the boy a set of marbles. On the sunny deck the Tom Bowler streaks like a bee towards the yawning side. Too slow, he watches a canvas shoe descend, the glass circle lifting in calloused fingers. The sailor smiles slowly, holding it out to the woman in black, while across the deck his crewmates watch.
The child slides past his mother’s waist to take the marble from the man’s hand. His voice is like the English lady’s finch, lonely and precise: ‘Thank you sir. Mama we need to go down now.’
The sailor’s gaze slides down her dress. He doesn’t move as the boy tugs his mother away. Her hand is cold. Behind them the sailors’ voices rise.
* * * *
From the dark bunk he watches her stand by the tiny porthole. Orange light from the deck above flares beyond the spray-flecked glass. She lifts her hand to wipe away the room’s steam, and over the engine’s grumble he hears her breathing change.
‘Mama! Is there something there?’
As she turns from the glass her eyes are strange. Her loose hair slides on her shoulders. ‘Yanni, just a dream. Go back to sleep.’
Outside, the night sea shifts and surges.
* * * *
The boy leans at the side of the ship and imagines the drop . . .
‘What about women, you know, after the revolution?’
‘Everyone will be equal. All the people. All the workers together.’ He is standing at the edge of the pond, peering into the tea-dark water, ducks squabbling around his feet.
‘But it seems to me ...’ I squeeze the last of the bread between my fingers, ‘doesn’t it seem to you it’s not just about money?’
He stares at the scummy surface as if searching for something. ‘I say to you before, it is power, it is who makes the things.’
I am thinking about the men on the building site just opposite, who shout at me. The man outside the cinema who makes strange smacking noises with his lips. Mick’s friends Steve and Gaz, who despise girls if they’re ugly, and hate them if they’re not. ‘Why didn’t you ever get married, Yanni?’
He is quiet for a minute. ‘When I come here, there were not many Greek girls — not to marry an orphan with no family. And my English is not so good. Also ... it is a hard life for women. My mother had a hard life in Greece, before she left. She ran away, I found out later.’ He looks at me across the muddy bank. ‘Not like you, Geenee. Here the women are very free.’
I fold up the paper bread bag. It makes a forlorn crumpling noise. ‘I suppose.’
‘If I had met you when I was young, Geenee, I would have married you,’ he says, and gives me his sad, generous smile.
* * * *
. . . imagines the drop down the wall of the hull . . .
The swell grows as Fremantle recedes. Rottnest Island slips past to the left, and the spray increases. A line of clouds blurs the northwest horizon, but here the sun still flattens itself on the white stretch of sail.
Yanni is motionless in the bows. Mick slouches long-legged in the stern, singing the same three lines of a song over and over. Every now and then he gives me his sad-puppy look. I am thinking of his swagger, which mars his beautiful legs, smudges the gold of their outline in the sun. What scared me at the party was how many of them nodded, looked at him with sympathy as he sputtered out accusations. I wish again I hadn’t come.
At noon the wind drops suddenly. Land is a purple blur behind us to the east as Mick rises to secure the limply flapping sail. ‘What now?’ he asks me.
‘The anchor,’ says Yanni, not turning his head. The back of his neck looks sunburned. Mick scowls and shuffles to let the sea anchor out.
Yanni rises stiffly and moves over to where I’m sitting. His face is burned and tense. As he unfolds his crimson bundle I almost start to laugh. It is an old cape, braided at the shoulders — like something from my childhood dressing-up box. Only his stiff breathing stops me.
Casting it over one arm, he makes his way back round the sail to the bow. He turns to the darkening northwest, shakes the red cloth in the sun, and calls out. I think his words are Spanish, not Greek. They sound dim and muffled in the still air.
Mick is incredulous. He grabs my elbow and whispers loudly in my ear. ‘What the hell is he doing?’
‘Shhh. I don’t know! It’s a symbol or something. He’s afraid of the sea.’
‘Crazy old coot.’
Yanni calls out again. His spine is straight. This time the words clang against the metal of the water — weird and archaic. I can’t move my eyes from his slight figure, tense against the shifting of the boat. I feel how small he is, how small we are, a tiny stick-and-bone bundle on the swaying desert of the sea.
Yanni is breathing in to call again when Mick’s shout breaks across it: ‘What the FUCK is THAT?’
* * * *
Past Colombo the men in uniform search the ship. They toss about the child’s bedding. They jostle in the doorway and speak only to each other. One holds up a worn and embroidered petticoat, and shakes it in the dim cabin. The sun from the porthole softens it with light. His mother holds his shoulders hard. She is gazing out the round window.
‘You have more trunks?’ the leader says in English. The woman stares at the sun-filled glass, and her son shakes his head. ‘Where is your husband?’ asks another man, too loudly.
This is what the child remembers: the long corridor of the lower deck, the taste of his own wrist in his mouth, the door closed behind him.
When they leave, they drop the petticoat in the corridor outside.
* * * *
The boy leans at the side of the ship and imagines the drop down the wall of the hull; the sudden shock of cobalt, down, down through warmer currents to cold. Since the men came, his mother has locked her cabin door, and will not speak. When he talks of Australia she is silent.
In Australia he will build her a house. She can sit under the olive trees in the sunlight and stare at the moving leaves. If strange men come to the house he will send them away. He will buy her a floppy hat to cover her hair. They will be happy.
* * * *
Later, in the new country, he will call it a dream, riven by the engine’s changing roar. The child climbs the steep below-deck stairs. Ahead of him the woman’s hair blows back, slowly, like seaweed: the soiled petticoat is trailing in her hand. She throws the scrap of cloth into the sullen orange of the wake, gleaming in the deck flares. She raises her arms. She is calling.
Huddled by the wall, her son watches the sea divide. Watches immensity roll across the dark towards her. Sees her turn back towards him, turn away again.
Wakes night after night in his Fremantle foster home, shaking and screaming at the harbour down below.
* * * *
. . . the sudden shock of cobalt . . .
The clouds on the horizon are boiling suddenly, flattening into massive anvil shapes. I can see wind whipping across the sea, rushing towards us. And a wave, a cloud, a shoulder, heaves up from the water, impossibly high.
Yanni cries out and flaps the cape high. The wave-mountain turns, and a last gleam of sun catches on green glass near its head: horns.
The Bull slouches across the water towards the boat. It moves with a horrifying smoothness, and leaves no wake. Now only its knees are covered by the ocean below. It is huger than a dream.
The red cloth flutters in the wind. Mick is clutching the tiller, mouth stretched wide. The monster lowers its head and charges. In the dark muscles of its shoulder I see fish, moving, but its eyes are hot and ancient. The yacht heels over as the wind of its passing flings the boom around.
‘Hai!’ cries Yanni, staggering against the mast, and he whirls the red banner again. In a world turned to grey and violent green it glows like a beacon. Behind us, the Bull turns ponderously and falls through the air towards it. I push liquid from my face to see the glass scimitar slicing for Yanni’s head.
‘No!’ I scream hopelessly at the shadow massed above us. ‘Get away!’ My shoulder shoves Yanni to his knees, and the tip of the horn snatches the red cape from his arm. But the Bull has already pulled its head up. It stands in the water beside the wallowing boat, swollen as a cloud, and sways its head slowly back and forth. ‘Get away!’ Hysteria shudders my breath. ‘Get off.’
The great mass heaves a step backwards. The wind is dropping. In the sudden silence I can hear Mick choking and retching in the stern.
Yanni climbs slowly to his feet. He looks defeated. The cape spreads out in the water below us, sodden and sinking. He cranes his neck back up at the Bull and says something. This time I am sure it is Greek.
After a long moment, the molten shoulder turns, and the immensity of back roils with movement. At the green joints of the knees seaweed swirls. The Bull lurches away, thrusting through the waves with enormous, muscular strides. Near the horizon it merges with the surface, and the returning sun glints green on the last gleam of horn.
* * * *
. . . down, down . . .
After a while of silence, Mick moves to find the anchor. Yanni lifts his head from his knees.
‘Well I know now, Geenee,’ he says heavily. ‘I can go back to my country now. So I say thank you for this. And also to your friend.’ He rubs his prickly scalp, looking diminished and bitter.
‘But... Yanni...’
‘I see now. You must call him up. And even then, you can tell him to go.’
Coughing the last of the salt from my lungs, I almost miss the rest.
‘And so she didn’t, my mitera. She didn’t tell him to go.’
* * * *
. . . through warmer currents to cold.
Halfway back to shore the sea is a glinting plain again. A fresh westerly skips us across the surface like flying fish. Mick is concentrating on sail and tiller, and won’t speak to me — I wonder what he saw, and who he will blame. My own thoughts are circling through immensity, dark translucence, muscle.
‘Yanni?’
He looks up from the last of the bailing.
‘Can you teach me the words?’
‘They’re Greek. In this country better you learn Vietnamese.’ His forehead furrows. He strips off his overshirt and passes it to me. ‘You should wear more clothes, Geenee.’
His eyes are nowhere near my sodden T-shirt, but my skin flinches, pulling my arms across my chest. ‘I meant, those particular words.’
In the afternoon light his eyes become curiously flat, rejecting. My grandmother had that look — the effect of cataracts on brown eyes, that’s all. We are both silent, listening to the cold sound of the wind in the cables.
I trail my hand in the glassy water. The waves have edges like blades. I slide my gaze down their green sides, searching, hungry for the gleam of horns.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
What’s the name for the thing that comes before a bigger thing? An outlier, a scout before the army, a harbinger, a herald ...
‘Europa’ is a harbinger story for me — it heralded a novel project. Not that anyone in this story appears in the novel, but here are Greek myths, migrant ships, the Western Australian coastline. But in the novel, it is the maze’s prisoner — the bulhheaded Asterion — who is bundled into the hold with a sack over his head, bellowing desolation through the hull, then lost beneath our hard, bright, windy streets ...
‘Europa’ is for my friend George Stathopoulous.
— Cecily Scutt